The Call of Wisdom VI: God Teaches Those Who Cry Out

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me again is Teddy James, and we're looking at Proverbs 2. We've been looking at a short series of investigating, particularly Chapter 2, in the first four verses there.

But again, the context, in Chapter 1, we have divine wisdom personified, and wisdom goes, and we saw the graciousness of this, wisdom goes, and every person wisdom goes to except when the Messiah is here.

Every other human is a human that has started life and continued life for some stretch as a rebel against God, a Psalm 2 kind of person. We would prefer to throw God's restraints off and rule ourselves.

So wisdom seeks these people. That's gracious. Wisdom doesn't just meet them at the temple or in a synagogue. Wisdom is seen as a woman going down every street into the marketplace, crying out to humanity, lifting her voice, not just whispering in a church and saying, you know, listen to me.

If only you would listen to me. So if only humanity would take what God says seriously. And what follows then is two very different lives based on how the people respond to wisdom's invitation. One life is a life of self-destruction where wisdom is ignored, God's word is ignored, and man chooses what he thinks is best for him.

And it reminds us a lot of, you know, Matthew 7, where Christ talks about people who hear the word, but don't apply the word in obedience. And their lives are like a house that's built that looks perfect and sound, but a storm comes through and it's destroyed.

And the destruction is shocking. You know, you think of a tornado that sweeps through an area and maybe an entire family was in that house and the tornado touches down and the entire family is gone. And, you know, and everyone is just brokenhearted.

The destruction's terrible. And we see that happen spiritually when individuals, when married couples, when moms and dads, when kids ignore God and say, I think actually I have a better idea of how to do this.

So wisdom gives some very alarming warnings here about the destruction that will come if we ignore her. But then there's the other option. And that is a life that in verse 5 and following in chapter 2, we have a very different life, a life that is not effortless.

And it's still a life that's lived in a world where there is sin and sorrow, but it's a life that is guided by God and walked with God. And it's a happy life. We think of Psalm 119, the happiness of those that, you know, walk on the path of obedience with the hearts that are wholeheartedly seeking the Lord.

So two different options. And it's easy to say, well, obviously I want the option of happiness and not the option of self-destruction. And the big problem there is living in the land of good intentions.

And we say, well, I want that, but we don't do anything differently. And that's where chapter 2, verse 1 through verse 4 is so helpful. Teddy, you want to read those first verses? My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding.

Yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

Receiving, Treasuring, and Attentive Listening to Wisdom

So we have a number of very specific pictures, these dynamic, you know, living active pictures of how we are to respond to God's word if we desire to walk with the living God and the happiness that comes from that.

And there are these pictures, you know, there's overlap in them. I think we could say this, there's not a specific order here where one necessarily leads to the next, but they do need to stay connected.

Well, they form a unit. This is how you call out for wisdom. Yeah. So if I'm responding to the word of God, to the wisdom of God, then these are elements that will be there. And we don't get to say, well, I'm good at this, but I'm not very good at this.

Well, I mean, you could say, well, I don't really want to welcome in the word of God, the truths of God, but I want to incline my ear to it. You know, it doesn't make sense. Yeah. So again, the elements that are given here, receiving God's words or welcoming them in, treasuring God's commandments, making our ear attentive.

So, you know, very active listening, inclining our heart, making sure that our deepest yearnings are turned toward God through His word and not toward other things. And then we come to verse three, which is our next to the last.

And that is the issue of prayer, crying for discernment, lifting our voice for understanding. So there are so many wonderful things we could say here. We're going to have to limit ourselves. But the picture here is that along with the other activities of receiving, treasuring, making my ear attentive, actively listening and bending my heart's deepest desires toward the God of this book and what He says, along with all of those, it is essential that prayer or crying out to the Lord, a sense of neediness, teachableness, humility has to be one aspect of the way we approach the word of God or the other things that we've been talking about will not be beneficial.

No, absolutely not. And I'm reminded of, you know, a couple of weeks ago when you were in AC, we're on the podcast talking about union with Christ. AC gave this illustration that has stuck with me that, you know, his two-year-old or three-year-old son came to him in the middle of the night and said, Daddy, I want some water.

You would not go to the king of your land at two o 'clock in the morning and wake him up and say, I want some water, king. But because you have, because his son is his son, as a father, AC's going to say, okay, let's go get you some water.

I will give you what you need. As we cry out to the father, he will give us what we need, but he does command us, cry out for it. You must ask for it. As a child comes to his father to ask for water or to ask for bread, as Christ says, he will answer and he will answer lovingly as a father does.

In Proverbs chapter one, verse 23, we find assurance that God is willing to be the teacher of those that cry out to him. Wisdom here personified says, turn to my reproof or, you know, repent, turn, do a 180.

Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you. I will make my words known to you. So when we see that statement made to humanity and when we see that we have a book that God has given us, so believing that this is the book that God is ultimately the author of and believing that God is willing to be our teacher ought to just really move us, motivate us to the most diligent, careful, happy study of this book.

But because of our own selfishness, our own pride, our own unbelief, and because there's an enemy that's always willing to lie to us, there are some subtle dangers that come in just because of what we said.

So if this is God's book and God is the perfect teacher, there are some wrong assumptions you can arrive at. So what would you warn people? Before we get to that, I do want to make the statement because we have to be commanded, like you said, these should just thrill our heart.

You mean that God will speak to me, he will open my heart to the wisdom of his word, he will teach me the fact that I now have to be commanded, seek this wisdom, call out for it, tells me just how fallen I am that I have to be commanded to do so.

But to what you were saying, there are so many, I mean, we have an enemy that will lie to us, like you're saying, and there's so many ditches that we can fall into, even when it comes to reading scripture.

And one of those ditches is we can say, oh, well, this is a perfect book written by the perfect God, and therefore all the wisdom that it contains is going to be easily attainable, and it's just right there on the surface for me to get.

The Bible Requires Hard Work, Not Easy Surface Reading

Yeah, if you think about books, so the medium of teaching someone through a written source, when we read other books and they're difficult, we think, man, I have to work hard to understand what the author's saying.

I remember reading, particularly working on the PhD, some writers would be easy to understand. I mean, I had been reading, you know, from that era a long time, so you get used to their language. But then it's one thing to read a Puritan from the 17th century and get used to 17th century religious verbiage.

But then you go to 21st century writers from Cambridge University, and they live in this academic world, and when they write, it would take me sometimes, you know, 40 minutes to understand a page that a fellow wrote.

And I think, wait, wait, wait, wait, what does he mean by that? You know, he uses these words in ways I've never seen them. So, a human book, we think, well, it takes hard work. But a divine book, surely we feel all the jewels will be on the surface, and it'll just fall into our hands.

And so, because it's a perfect book, I don't have to work hard, and that's a lie. It is. And if there was ever a book worthy of work to understand, then it must be the Bible. So, one of the things that we kind of need to get into, John, is how do we do that?

Yeah, and we'll talk about this more next week, because we're going to look at the last picture, digging and seeking out like a person would dig and seek for treasure. We don't expect to find jewels on the surface of the ground as we walk outside.

You know, when we go mowing our yard, we don't look down and see chunks of gold, and copper, and silver, and platinum. As nice as that would be. Yeah. And so, you know, that requires special work, and we'll talk about that next week.

Yeah. I think that, you know, along with the lie that because it's a divine book, we don't have to work hard, another lie that applies to your question is that, because we have a divine teacher, we don't have to work hard, because He's a great teacher.

So, He's just going to, He's, you know, the Spirit of God is just going to give it. And that also is a lie. God gives us means, and He fuels our humble, earnest, believing use of the means. But God will not teach us apart from, you know, the appropriate response that He gave us in Proverbs 2, for example.

If we won't welcome in the Word, if we won't treasure what He says, if we won't bend our ear actively and our heart toward what He says, and if we will not cry out to Him, God is not going to just be like a butler that shows up at your bedroom door in the morning and hand you all the truths you need for the day.

So, having a perfect teacher also doesn't negate the need for work. But back to your question. When we come to a passage, I think we're going to see that prayer is the appropriate ingredient mixed with these others.

So, while I'm doing all the others, not in the place of the others, but alongside them, I'm crying out to the author of the book to teach me. And that doesn't mean that doing study, even using commentaries, for example, that doesn't mean that as we use commentaries, we don't need to pray.

The commentary is not the Word of God. It's a teacher talking about the Word of God. And so, it's like having some of the best teachers from the past, you know, join you at your, you know, in your breakfast nook or late at night when you're up reading.

And so, this very helpful teacher is there to say, you know, here are things you might want to consider as you're reading this passage. But even as you're using a commentary to constantly cry out to the Lord and say, God, I need to understand, is this commentator correct here?

Have they gotten off the course? They mean well, but are they mistaken? They can be mistaken. And so, even using other tools, and we've talked about the kinds of tools people can use. And we've mentioned that there's kind of an order, we could say, we move from the more nuts and bolts to the more complete devotional kind of thoughts.

So, maybe we could use this illustration. We move from the kind of sources that give us ingredients for a meal, and we start there, and we end with reading the kind of books that hand you the meal pre-made.

So, in other words, we read commentaries or, you know, we use other sources like a concordance or a Greek or Hebrew word study book. We start with those or with commentaries that are more basic, where they're giving you a lot of facts.

They're giving you a lot of background information that you need, like ingredients for a meal, that you need to make the meal, but they're not doing the work for you. So, Hendrickson's commentaries on the New Testament, Baker books published those many years ago.

That's a great example. The N-I-C-O-T, N-I-C-N-T, the New International Commentary on Old Testament, the New International Commentary on the New Testament, I think that's the title for those. Those are modern sets that have been put out.

They're not cheap, but those are good commentaries that are not sermons. They're basic facts that help you do the work. So, they hand you the vegetables and the meat and the spices, and you're going to have to do the work.

And you want to start there. You don't want to always go to pre-made food, but then you can move more toward the devotional, more toward the finished meal. Once you do the work of dealing with commentaries that give you the basic facts, maybe a mid-level commentary that still gives you a lot of facts, but also gives you a fair amount of devotional material.

I think of the Geneva series commentaries. They're not short. The Geneva commentaries are produced by Banner of Truth, and they're usually older writers, Puritan writers. I think they're always older writers.

And they're a bit verbose. They can be a bit long. The commentary on Colossians that they do, for example, is like a six, 700-page book for a couple-page letter. So, they're not all that big, but I find that they're worth it.

They're older writers that are dealing with the facts, but they're also very warm-hearted. And then the final stage in using commentaries could be those commentaries which are very devotional or sermonic.

John MacArthur's commentaries are... The Wellwyn commentaries? Yeah, the Wellwyn commentaries. I think Evangelical Press prints those. Or you could find a trusted pastor who has preached on that and listen or read a sermon.

Yeah. Sometimes I will go online and I'll type in my favorite modern preacher's name and see if he's preached on it, and I want to hear what he says. You don't want to start with that. You don't want to start with Matthew Henry because they've done...

Which is another good devotional. Yeah, that's another very good devotional. So, I would save that for the end. Or like Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is one of my all-time favorite commentary writers. But really, those are his sermons.

So, I don't want to start there because he's done all the work for me. I want to go back to the nuts and bolts, to the basic ingredients of the passage. And that means starting with the commentary after I've studied the passage itself, looking at commentaries that are more basic.

Here are the facts. And then moving more toward the devotional. But we'll talk about that again next week. We'll hit that as we look at digging and seeking for treasure. Um, we said that these are subtle dangers.

You know, perfect book, perfect teacher in God. So, it doesn't require hard work, but it does. And we need to cry out to God while we're doing hard work. So, we pray and study. We pray and welcome the Word in.

We pray and bend our ear actively toward it. We pray and treasure it. We pray and turn our heart toward it. It can't be one or the other. It's always that wonderful dynamic of depending upon God, crying out to Him, and laboring hard because we know that God will help us.

And there are a lot of reasons that we need both of these. Absolutely. So, just a few of them. We, I'm a testament to this, but we can come to the Bible for years and years and years as a believer, but have a warped understanding of a particular passage or a particular theme that runs throughout Scripture.

And then as you mature, and as God grows you, you know, you can see, wow, I read this completely wrong. And so, we have to come in dependence on that. When you have things that you really do not understand, or that you understand incorrectly, you do not, you're not aware of just how much that can impact everything else that you read in Scripture.

As I came to the church, which has now been nine years ago, I feel like we haven't been here that long, but nine years ago, we started, you know, John, listening to your preaching, listening to the preaching of Chuck and our other elders, and those were incredibly helpful.

But where I was truly challenged was in the conversations that I had with the people that were here, because they, listening to a sermon is one thing, and I think that we should definitely do that. But we also have to have those conversations with people because that's a protection, that is iron sharpening iron.

The Church, Conversations, and Blind Spots

Yeah. So, in order to not get stuck with blind spots, which we are unaware of, which is why we call them blind spots, in order not to misunderstand passages, because we have a certain perspective, a filter we're reading through, we all have those that have been handed to us, maybe by the church we grew up in, or the Christians that we know, even the people we read from the past, you know, our favorite Christian authors.

We all have that, and it's not wrong to have certain perspectives. We just want to make sure that our perspectives are constantly informed by the Bible itself, and our blind spots are constantly being illuminated, the little dark corners are being, having the light of God's words shined in them.

And so, as we're coming to the scripture, it is God that we're crying out to, God, help me understand. And there are other things that help us with that, you know, being connected to the church, being connected to other believers who can help us and say to us, I think you need to reconsider your view of that passage, and here's why, or like we said, using teachers from the past.

But ultimately, we are asking the Lord to teach us. Now, when we think about the greatness of that teacher, it's good to stop and imagine, how would we respond if great teachers in other areas, great human teachers, not the divine teacher, but let's just use kind of some illustrations here.

If great teachers in the field that they were great in were offering a master class on the topic that they mastered, how privileged would we feel? How seriously would we take it if we had an opportunity to be in the class?

So let's, I'm going to shoot you a bunch that I thought of, okay? So just off the cuff, I thought of things like, okay, so if I'm interested in sciences, particularly, you know, physics, and these aren't going to be all Christian people.

What if, and in our illustration, we're allowed to get people that have died back out of the grave. What if I, you know, I'm listening to the news, I'm, you know, I'm checking whatever on my phone, and I find out that Albert Einstein, who is still alive, is going to be giving a series of lectures in Memphis, Tennessee, and I live pretty close, and only 100 people will be able to be in this class.

And it's for those who are interested in, you know, what he has to say about physics. And so if I am a guy who has a PhD in physics, you know, the chance to sit under Einstein, or, you know, Stephen Hawking, whether I agree with their views of God or not, I would want to listen in their classes.

So think about others. Philosophy class, going to be taught by Socrates and Aristotle. Apologetics class, being taught by C .S. Lewis. You can sign up now. If you're lucky, you get to be one that goes.

Computer science, you know, coding by Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Creative writing by Tolkien. Theology by John Owen. Preaching by Spurgeon. Evangelism by Whitfield. Missiology by Hudson Taylor. I mean, you know, if these people were still alive, and you were able to get into that class, how would you view that privilege?

And then we apply that and say, I can't get into those classes, but I can get into the classroom of the living God. And He, in Proverbs 1, has assured me He will teach me. So I cry out to Him, and I aggressively make room greedily for the Word of God and for the study of that.

Aggressive Dependence on God in Study and Prayer

Yeah, and I think aggressively there is the key. If I had the chance to sit under Tolkien to teach creative writing, there is nothing that would prevent me from making it into that class. There is nothing that would prevent me from doing the homework that he had assigned.

There's nothing that would prevent me from, you know, if he said, OK, I want you to write a, you know, 5 ,000-word short story that I will read and critique. There'd be no end. There would be nothing in the world that would stop me from doing those things.

But I think we have just become so familiar with the Scriptures, and it's so accessible, and it's always, well, I can read it later, or I can come and pray later, that because of that, we don't pursue wisdom aggressively, as we really should.

Yeah, it's, maybe we would say that the lavish provision of God, the sheer magnitude of His kindness through His Word, and, you know, in the modern world, the many methods we have to study the Bible, you know, these have combined in our own selfish hearts at times to become an argument for a less earnest use of the means, or, you know, like you said, I can always do that later.

Whereas if C .S. Lewis is going to be teaching a class on apologetics, or John Owen is going to be explaining, you know, the book of Hebrews, which he did, I think, like eight volumes on, if the class starts at eight in the morning, there's no way if I'm in that class that I'm going to sleep through it, you know?

There's no way I'm going to stay up late the night before and jeopardize that. But with the Bible, I think, well, God is so generous, it'll be there tomorrow. So yeah, dangers. What ought to produce in us a very aggressive use of, you know, hard work, intellectually, and confident dependence in prayer.

Instead, it produces a laziness. Let me give a few quotes from some men that combined in their quote, the necessity of prayer and hard study. Luther. Now, I didn't write down the Latin phrase. I'm so disappointed, John.

But here's the English phrase. Luther wrote and said, in English, good praying is good studying. Now, when we know Luther and the fact that he spent so many countless hours translating the Bible from Latin into German, from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew into German, and his translation was like the King James of their day.

Luther is not a man that thinks praying substitutes for hard work. But if we come to the scripture, prayer, which is hard work, is essential to good studying. Another couple centuries after Luther, Robert Layton, English scholar and pastor, he said, you dig for this treasure in scripture.

You dig for this treasure on your knees. That's so good. Yeah. Simple picture, isn't it? You're digging for treasure, but you're not standing up to dig for this treasure. It's always on the knees. So when we were in Canada a few weeks ago, we were up there for you to teach, and we did a podcast with Hugh Morrison and Dave Story.

But every morning we got together, we had a prayer time and Hugh Morrison was talking about prayer. And he said something that I think will always stick with me. He said, you know, when I'm having my quiet time, I may be sitting in a chair, but I do a lot of other things in that chair too.

I may read other books. I might have a conversation with one of my kids or with my wife sitting in that chair. Well, I could go to the table, but I also, I eat at the table and I do this at the table.

But there's really only one thing that I get down on my knees to do. And that is to pray. And since hearing that, I've really taken this, getting on your knees to pray is such a wonderful thing because it does genuinely focus your mind and help you.

It's just a physical thing that does help you to pray, I think. Yeah. Let me give you another quote. Charles Bridges. Bridges, who wrote the commentary that's my favorite for Psalm 119, said, study can make you a Bible scholar, but prayer brings you under the divine tutelage or the divine teaching or instruction.

Prayer brings you into the deity's classroom, so to speak. And so these quotes, good reminder, hard work and the believer crying out to God, the author of the Bible to teach you as just as you're studying, you know, in your personal study of scripture or as you're listening to the word, anytime you're coming into contact with God's word, all those elements that Proverbs 2 gives us to do, they ought to be there.

But prayer is in a sense, you know, alongside each one of them. Now, if a person asks, OK, but, you know, what kind of things do I pray other than God teach me? When you open the Bible, if you want some helpful examples of how to pray, because you have the book that God wrote in your hand and you're wanting to understand, appreciate, live upon it.

There is a very helpful chapter in the Bible. It's Psalm 119. Remember when we talked about this before of the 176 verses, 172 of the 176 are direct prayers to God, and they are prayers that are primarily appropriate for a man or a woman or young person who has opened a Bible.

They look at the words on the page and this longing, this expression of happiness or of sorrow, contrition, dependence. They cry out to God. So you have 172 examples of what you might pray as Proverbs says you ought to cry out.

Well, what do I cry out? Well, there are 172 examples in Psalm 119, and that really, I think, is a great place to start. I could not agree more. I personally have been walking through Psalm 119. At the beginning of every morning's quiet time, using Psalm 119 simply as a beginning fuel for prayer that carries over into the rest of the quiet time, no matter where I may be reading in scripture.

And it is just simply so helpful because often when we're talking about prayer, we can find ourselves in ruts, right? And we can, you know, it turns into prayer number seven. And if you want to make sure that you don't do that, well, use the scripture itself to pray God's word back to him.

So take a short passage, one verse, one stanza from Psalm 119, internalize that and pray it back to God. And imagine, John, if I could take your example, just a little bit further. If Tolkien or Einstein or Hawkins, if these men weren't just saying, hey, I'm hosting a class over here.

You have to be here at eight o 'clock. If instead they said, I'm going to come to your living room and I'm going to meet with you and I'm going to talk with you and you can ask me any questions you have and I will teach you.

Would you not take the opportunity to make sure you're there, you're prepared, you're ready? That is what God is giving us. He will meet us in his word where we are and teach us from there. Next week, we'll finish up this look at Psalm 2 and the practical and appropriate responses to the word of God, which keep us from living our lives in the kingdom of good intentions, which leads to destruction.

And the last statement is found in verse four, the last activity. If you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures, then he says in verse five, and then what follows is, you know, the happy consequences.

So not just crying out in prayer, but still the very hard work of digging and mining out from the scriptures what God says to us. So we'll look at that next week.